All right, who am I kidding? We’ve been cosleeping in various forms for months, now. It’s just that we’ve finally given in and consolidated the process, wrestling the spare bed up from the basement and — when a certain three-year-old deemed it “too low” — topping it with a single air mattress so that he could nestle in beside us and feel secure enough to sleep through the night. He shoves a pillow into the gap between the beds, spreads his blanket over it, and then sleeps, or tries to, at least, on the blanket-on-the-pillow, so as to be even closer to us. I am reminded of how he slept as a tiny infant, only on his back on a pillow between us. And how I thought, then, what happens when he grows?

Now I know.

Are we suckers or intensely practical? Tomato, to-mah-toe: Does it matter, as long as we are sleeping?

Ah. But. About that, that sleeping thing. You think we’d be doing more of it. Maybe we are. Maybe we aren’t. It’s hard to say. The pro of the arrangement — interior design aesthetics, obviously, aside — are that we can “parent throughout the night” (kthnxbai, Dr. Sears) without actually having to get out of bed. The con is that we are, still, parenting a fair bit throughout the night. But at least that means we can rub Isaac’s tummy or his back and shush him, and hope that he will, as we put it, “thunk back to sleep.” Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes the thunking involves much rearranging of the blanket on the pillow and much gentle suggesting that perhaps this is not a viable arrangement. Which is met with much resistance.

It is, I admit, quite lovely to look over at his little sleeping body in the middle of the night. It’s like a little gift, a prize. But — and you can colour me grouchy on this one — it’s still a consolation prize. Like, as the lovely and amazing Rachel Turiel puts it, “walking away with the veggie chopamatic … when you really wanted the new car, or simply to still be asleep.”